Ballardian: the World of J.G. Ballard

Is Woody Allen a Ballard fan? Lucy Vickery at The Spectator certainly is.

Good old postmodernism. Here’s another claim about manga being influenced by an obscure Ballard story.

“What kind of animals are being exhibited?” Ballard’s “The Recognition” is currently featuring on BBC Radio 7.

This is the second of Dan O’Hara’s re-translations of JGB interviews originally published in German. This one dates from 1976, and in it Ballard provides comment on Russian writers and explains how film technique infiltrates and influences his own writing.

In 1991 Simon Brook made a short film from J.G. Ballard’s obscure 1963 short story, ‘Minus One’. Enjoy this super-rare screening of Simon’s film.

Guardian columnist Jean Hannah Edelstein reviews the 12 Steps Down exhibition, based on J.G. Ballard’s short story, ‘The Drowned Giant’.

News of a ’site-concerned work’ inspired by Ballard’s short story ‘The Drowned Giant’ and by ‘the labyrinthine, vernacular architecture of Shoreditch Town Hall’s basement’, with 25 artists invited to produce work around these themes.

Here’s a selection of visual art that we’ve previously featured on this site, all directly inspired by or referencing themes in Ballard’s work. See Part 1 for more recent discoveries.

Image from ‘Future Ruins’
by Michelle Lord

Inspired by author J.G. Ballard’s literary visions of modernist architectural design and his prophetic views on the technological demise of the […]

Here’s a selection of visual art I’ve recently come across, all directly inspired by or referencing themes in Ballard’s work.

Ridgewell WWII Airfield: ‘Now little more than a collection of old huts, the area is haunted by the sounds of crashing WWII aeroplanes, shouting airmen, and other noises.’ (from paranormaldatabase.com).
Heuristic England is an interesting new blog exploring dreams, parapsychology, spectral presence, Freud, Jung … and Ballard. In a couple of recent posts, the blog’s convenor, […]

+ Previously, students from Digital Media Design, St East Lancs, Institute of Higher Education at Blackburn College, gave us the title sequence created for a fictional movie based on JG Ballard’s ‘A Guide To Virtual Death’.
Now they’ve come up with this, ‘a title sequence created for a fictional movie based on a short story by […]

While I think Jonathan Weiss’s film of Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition was successful in its own right, I still believe there’s potential for a version (maybe not a straight adaptation, perhaps an obliquely angled ‘nod and a wink’; maybe even a sequel) that updates the notion of celebrity culture, that takes up the direction hinted […]

‘Thirteen to Centaurus’, directed by Peter Potter, is an adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s 1962 short story of that name, produced as part of the BBC’s Out of the Unknown series of science-fiction dramatisations. But at that time film and television was just not capable of delivering the frisson that the best SF literature provided (it […]

Recently I directed your attention to Xander Walker’s no-budget adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s ultra-sardonic short story, ‘A Guide to Virtual Death’.
Now we have this, a ‘title sequence created for a fictional movie based on a novel by JG Ballard, ‘A Guide To Virtual Death’.’ As part of this conceit, that ‘Virtual Death’ is actually a […]

Interview by Simon Sellars.
Simon Reynolds is one of the most recognisable music critics around — or at least his style is, not least for its willingness to tackle pop music as an art form worthy of sustained intellectual discourse rather than as a fleeting moment of adolescent flash. Reynolds breaks new ground, melding unbridled […]

+ CATALOGUE OF CONTEMPORARY ATROCITIES

Jeannette Baxter, organiser of this weekend’s J.G. Ballard Conference at the University of East Anglia, delivers a challenging examination of Surrealist influences in Ballard’s Running Wild for Issue 5 of the online journal, Papers of Surrealism.
‘The Surrealist Fait-Divers: Uncovering Violent Histories in J. G. Ballard’s Running Wild’: Abstract
In this paper […]

This is Xander Walker’s excellent no-budget film of Ballard’s dark, scathing short story ‘A Guide to Virtual Death’ (one of the last shorts JGB ever wrote, unfortunately):
For reasons amply documented elsewhere, intelligent life on Earth became extinct in the closing hours of the 20th Century. Among the clues left to us, the following schedule of […]

Left: Ballard’s author pic from the Varsity student newspaper (image & PDF courtesy Rick McGrath).
Mike Holliday has uploaded J.G. Ballard — A Collector’s Guide, an in-depth information resource designed “as a ‘helping hand’ to anyone interested in collecting books, stories, and other material by the British author J. G. Ballard”. There’s a lot of […]

OPENING LINE:
“Apocalypse. A disquieting feature of this annual exhibition — to which the patients themselves were not invited — was the marked preoccupation of the paintings with the theme of world cataclysm, as if these long-incarcerated patients had sensed some seismic upheaval within the minds of their doctors and nurses.”
For many, The Atrocity Exhibition is […]

Interview by Simon Sellars

JG Ballard. Photo: Paul Murphy.
In the year that this website’s been in operation, it seems to have had a momentum — a secret logic — all its own. Our interviews with such luminaries as Bruce Sterling, John Foxx, Mike Ryan and Iain Sinclair — even the irascible Jonathan Weiss — have […]

JG Ballard. Photo: Paul Murphy.
On 14 September 2006 JG Ballard gave a reading from his new novel, Kingdom Come, and talked to Robert McCrum of the Observer at the Institute of Education, London — the evening was presented by Blackwell. Looking rather dapper and displaying a sharpness and wit that puts people half his age […]

OPENING LINE:
“I first met Jane Ciracylides during the Recess, that world slump of boredom, lethargy and high summer which carried us all so blissfully through ten unforgettable years, and I suppose that may have had a lot to do with what went on between us.” (from ‘Prima Belladonna’).
From the 2001 Flamingo edition (originally one volume; […]

by J.G. Ballard
Short stories are the loose change in the treasury of fiction, easily ignored beside the wealth of novels available, an over-valued currency that often turns out to be counterfeit. At its best, in Borges, Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe, the short story is coined from precious metal, a glint of gold that […]

by J.G. Ballard
Vermilion Sands is my guess at what the future will actually be like. It is a curious paradox that almost all science fiction, however far removed in time and space, is really about the present day. Very few attempts have been made to visualize a unique and self-contained future that offers no warnings […]

Now I’ve heard it all…
J.G. Ballard used to explain UFO sightings of the ‘Prophet Yahweh’…
So, I’ve seen the video, and this guy stands in a park in a city underneath some major military and commercial air traffic routes, and “summons” UFO’s.
Now, there is a short story by J. G. Ballard (”Empire of the Sun”, “Crash”, […]

From the Guardian: Wednesday August 24, 2005
"Keep it brief’: A new £15,000 prize for short stories suggests Britain is finally getting over its obsession with the novel. And not before time, says Aida Edemariam
… [William] Boyd identified seven types of short story, beginning with the "event-plot story", one of its earliest forms, […]

From the Londonist, July 18, 2005:
“We only just got around to seeing Peter Watkins’ Punishment Park - we figured we’ve waited for 35 years… what’s another week or so matter. Now we’re kicking ourselves for not getting along to the ICA sooner so we could recommend this to you guys earlier. We caught the […]